Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In an earlier blog, we went over one of the benefits of India’s DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) . In this one, we go over another benefit – engagement , as explained in Rahul Matthan’s The Third Way .   The most obvious reason why DPI has increased and improved citizens’ engagement is the cost reduction of everything digital as opposed to physical. People don’t need to create copies of documents; recipients don’t need to find storage space to keep it.   Even better, with a digitized system, identification no longer requires a trip; which saves both time and money. Workflows are easier to design and change. Digital trails help finding fraud or fault easier. Transactions are digitally signed and timestamped (sometimes geo-stamped, i.e., location coordinates included).   “Universally trusted digital rails” are now well and truly in place. The most used and well-known services of which is, yes, payments. UPI, a “blindingly simple system”, allows money transfer...

I was surprised to read Andrew Sullivan’s post on the decline in literacy in the West. No, not literally – everyone still goes to school and learns to read and write. It is the amount and quality of reading they read that has fallen, and the attendant consequences are becoming increasingly visible.   It started with the Internet. As bandwidth speeds increased, sites began to have more pictures and then more videos. “Visuals carry more visceral punch than sentences and paragraphs, and require less reason and effort.” Ominously: “The Internet, in other words, held the power to return us to the pre-literate culture from which a majority of humans had emerged only a few hundred years ago: images, symbols, memes.”   Today: “Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced re...

In earlier blogs, we saw the US and European policies on data. Coming to India, Rahul Matthan (in The Third Way ) points out it is one of those rare countries which has collected a huge amount of digital data before it became rich. This is entirely because of the combo of smartphone + cheap Internet plans. Even those of us who lived through this phase forget how quick it was – in 2014, just 15% of the population had a smartphone, by 2022 over 65% had one.   There is one element of the data equation on which India is unique, namely that its gathering was facilitated by deliberate government policies and protocols, not by private players. Yes, DPI (Digital Public Infrastructure) , which includes everything from UPI to eKYC to DigiYatra to DigiLocker and more. It ensures “interoperable digital architectures” (contrast that with the silos of Google or Facebook in the West; Alibaba or WeChat in China). Does the Indian approach provide any benefits and opportunities? Yes, on 3 front...

The standup comedian Trevor Noah’s parents (white Swiss father, black African mother) loved each other, yet had to think long and hard before deciding to have a child. It was a criminal act under apartheid for a black and white to have relations, let alone a child. But they decided to have one anyway, with the understanding that they could never be a family (Criminal act, remember?), writes Noah in Born a Crime .   After he was born, the father found himself wanting to be near his son. But he couldn’t do so openly. So they’d all meet up secretly. As a toddler, when Trevor went to play in a park, his dad would follow at a distance, careful never to come too close to draw attention. It was a police state like situation, you never knew who might call the authorities. Inevitably, the kid (Trevor) would sometimes notice his dad in the distance and start shouting, “Daddy! Daddy!” upon which his father would panic and run away…   Much later, Trevor would learn what happened t...

In an earlier blog, we saw the American attitude towards data and how it became the philosophy of the Internet, simply because the US was the first country on the Net and also its biggest market. Over time, the EU became a big market too. A significant difference in European views is rooted in the fact that few, if any, big Internet companies are European. Thus, the lobbying against data/privacy laws in the EU was far less (though the big American ones do lobby in EU), explains Rahul Matthan in The Third Way .   The EU attitude data is far more citizen-centric. Even before the Internet, that was the case in (Western) Europe largely because of their experience with fascism, Nazism and communism over the past century.   That history culminated in the GDPR doctrine for EU, a “full blown regulation… which became the most advanced data protection framework”. It says (1) all data about an individual belongs to that individual, not the company that collected it, (2) any dat...

The standup comedian Trevor Noah’s autobiography, Born a Crime , is about his life in South Africa only , so it doesn’t talk of his career as a comedian or life in the West. What it describes about the apartheid regime in South Africa is horrifying. Unlike many evils of the West, this is a recent one that continued till the 1990’s. It is thus not something that can be brushed aside as “It was a different era, you can’t apply today’s standards to older times”.   Apartheid was created after “studying” the institutionalized racism of Australia, America and Netherlands.   America, for example, moved the natives to specific areas called “reservations”, practiced slavery and then moved onto segregation. In South Africa, they did all of the above to the same group (blacks). The outcome? “The most advanced system of racial oppression known to man”.   A system built on the idea that races should not mix has to declare inter-racial relations (romance, marriage, children) i...